Posts by Fatima DeMelo

Between Instagram filters and Photoshop, people have no idea the storm a psyche takes to merely look in a mirror and think hey, I look pretty good today. Girls begin dieting at younger ages, often listing the fear of being fat above the death of a parent. It starts as a passing remark (“You would have a prettier face if you lost weight.”) or hearing more about appearance than accomplishments makes a person think having a more acceptable outside will make a more worthy human being.

The Healthy Minds, Healthy College initiative, represents one way to take on the negative voices or to find help dealing with eating disorders. If upcoming group sessions are not your thing, make an appointment to see a counsellor either here or off campus. In between talking about body image issues, get empowered with these resources in *print, digital or video.

*Note: Visit our Information Desk for help refining your search for body image as it relates to men, nursing, LGBT, community services, or another topic.

AudioVisual

Red River College Library wants students and staff to succeed both academically and with regards to their mental health. Look for our resources as part of THRIVE Week (November 6-10) as the Healthy Minds, Healthy College initiative showcases activities to help people navigate shorter days and incoming deadlines. For more resources, check out our new Library Guide.

Believe it or not, stress does serve a purpose for humans. At some point, we needed the combination of cortisol and adrenaline to either find something to eat or risk starving or run away as something wanted to eat us or it will risk starving. These days the Sabre Tooth Tiger has gone extinct while our to-do lists sadly can’t find itself on the endangered species list. While none of us want to make friends with stress, it’s worth understanding what happens to the body under the constant stresses in day-to-day life like assignment deadlines, grading papers for feedback, all while dealing with family or loved ones.

The key to understanding stress? Finding information on what it does, how to keep it under control, and applying it to our everyday life. Red River Library has a number of resources to tackle a vast subject, some might say stress-inducing, but a few key titles may help to make stress work for as a benefit than as an impediment.

Two Notable Streaming Videos

Want to watch right away? Click on the title to allow a new window to open and put in your username and password to watch.

Summary

Stanford University neurobiologist, Robert Sapolsky, has been advancing our understanding of stress – how it impacts our bodies and how our social standing can make us more or less susceptible. Research reveals that the impact of stress can be found deep within us, shrinking our brains, adding fat to our bellies, even unraveling our chromosomes. Yet understanding how stress works can help us figure out a ways to combat it and how to live a life free of the tyranny of this contemporary plague.

Summary

Stress is an individual reaction; it can be fantastic or it can be fatal! The choice of how we respond is ultimately up to each of us. In this program, you will explore the concept of stress and how it affects your body, mind, and spirit. You will learn how you can use humor to break the negative and irrational thought patterns that cause stress and reframe them into positive, powerful and productive tools for change.

Books

The titles below deal with stress and stress management. Click on the call numbers to take you directly to the record in the online catalog. For subjects related to stress, or to take the stress out of research in general, talk to library staff about book and database searches.

“Authenticity is a collection of choices that we have to make every day. It’s about the choice to show up and be real. The choice to be honest. The choice to let our true selves be seen.”-Brene Brown

In June 2010, a Texas researcher took the stage at TEDx Houston to deliver a talk about vulnerability, an abstract concept with huge applications as well as implications. The talk that gave Brene Brown a ‘vulnerability hangover’ at first, now numbers over thirty million views in addition to her bestselling books, the latest Braving The Wilderness explores the sticky concept of belonging in an increasingly divisive world.

From its beginnings as hours of qualitative research, with each response meticulously coded to find connections, her findings apply to the world of business, education, police, and military. Red River College Library is pleased to add her work to our collection, to help students ‘dare greatly’ in the arena of their chosen career.

Books

Gifts of Imperfection [electronic resource]: Let Go of Who You Think You’re Supposed To Be and Embrace Who You Are

I Thought It Was Just Me: Women Reclaiming Power and Courage in a Culture of Shame
Call Number: HQ 1206 .B765 2007

Daring Greatly: How The Courage to be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead
Call Number: BF 575 .A85 B76 2015

Last week, Jill Wilson wrote about a renewed interest in butchers and locally-sourced meats in a Free Press article entitled Riving an Art. In addition to talking to butchers from the newly opened Bouchée Boucher and established businesses like Denny’s Meats, the college’s Culinary Arts gets mentioned for expanding their repertoire by using whole animals in meat cutting courses, plus a brand-new second year course.

As usual, the library continues to support this, and other programs, with our collection. Below are selected titles from our collection yet these ‘prime cuts’ represent a fraction of culinary titles with topics already profiled in past posts. (What can we say, we like food as much as books.)

Books

The masters in The Butcher’s Apprentice teach you all the old-world, classic meat-cutting skills you need to prepare fresh cuts at home. Through extensive, diverse profiles and cutting lessons, butchers, food advocates, meat-loving chefs, and more share their expertise. Inside, you’ll find hundreds of full-color, detailed step-by-step photographs of cutting beef, pork, poultry, game, goat, organs, and more, as well as tips and techniques on using the whole beast for true nose-to-tail eating.–From the Online Catalog

If we want to improve the treatment of animals, Dominique Lestel argues, we must acknowledge our evolutionary impulse to eat them and we must expand our worldview to see how others consume meat ethically and sustainably.–From the book jacket

Pat LaFrieda, the third generation butcher, and owner of America’s premier meatpacking business presents the ultimate book of everything meat, with more than seventy-five mouthwatering recipes for beef, pork, lamb, veal, and poultry.For true meat lovers, a beautifully prepared cut of beef, pork, lamb, veal, or poultry is not just the center of the meal, it is the reason for eating.–From the Simon and Shuster Website

Kitchen Pro Series: Guide to Meat Identification, Fabrication, and Utilization is the definitive guide to purchasing and fabricating meat cuts for professional chefs, foodservice personnel, culinarians, and food enthusiasts. Part of the CIA’s new Kitchen Pro Series focusing on kitchen preparation skills, this user-friendly, full-color resource provides practical information on fabricating beef, pork, veal, lamb, game, and exotic meats. Helpful storage information, basic preparation methods for each cut, and recipes are included to give professional and home chefs everything they need to know to produce well-primed cuts of meat. For anyone who believes that butchery is a lost art, The Culinary Institute of America’s Chef Thomas Schneller counters that notion by providing a close examination and explanation of the craft in this clear and concise book.–From Amazon.ca

Streaming Videos

Need something more specific? Try searching by subject for things like “charcuterie”, in our online catalog. Not only will your search term show up in a title or subject line of a record, but it might also be part of an item’s table of contents. Contact the library for more search tips, help with streaming video or one-one help to support your career path.

Every year, Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential comes in and out of the library like a popular restaurant dish, causing the library to add a second copy to keep up with the demand. It’s not surprising considering he has a charisma to go with his knowledge, both displayed on CNN’s ‘Parts Unknown.’

Many believe Bourdain’s book ushered in the era of the ‘celebrity chef’, but his story provides a peek into the workings of a busy restaurant kitchen, something students and staff in the Culinary Arts Program experience with enough stories of their own to fill entire shelves. However, this book represents one part of a vast world and the library offers a few suggestions for those wanting to explore the world of chefs and their kitchens, a place of innovation and a reflection of the world in general.

A number of recent books, magazines, and television programs have emerged that promise to take viewers inside the exciting world of professional chefs. While media suggest that the occupation is undergoing a transformation, one thing remains clear: being a chef is a decidedly male-dominated job. Over the past six years, the prestigious James Beard Foundation has presented 84 awards for excellence as a chef, but only 19 were given to women. Likewise, Food and Wine magazine has recognized the talent of 110 chefs on its annual Best New Chef list since 2000, and to date, only 16 women have been included. How is it that women the gender most associated with cooking have lagged behind men in this occupation?–Back Cover

In the winter of 1996, journalist Michael Ruhlman donned a chef‘s jacket and houndstooth-check pants to join the students at the Culinary Institute of America, the country’s oldest and most influential cooking school. But The Making of a Chef is not just about holding a knife or slicing an onion, it’s also about the nature and spirit of being a professional cook and the people who enter the profession. As Ruhlman– now an expert on the fundamentals of cooking– recounts his growing mastery of the skills of his adopted profession, he propels himself and his readers through a score of kitchens and classrooms in search of the elusive, unnamable elements of great food. — Back cover.

It begins with a simple ritual: Every Saturday afternoon, a boy who loves to cook walks to his grandmother’s house and helps her prepare a roast chicken for dinner. The grandmother is Swedish, a retired domestic. The boy is Ethiopian and adopted, and he will grow up to become the world-renowned chef Marcus Samuelsson. This book is his love letter to food and family in all its manifestations. Marcus Samuelsson was only three years old when he, his mother, and his sister–all battling tuberculosis–walked seventy-five miles to a hospital in the Ethiopian capital city of Addis Adaba. Tragically, his mother succumbed to the disease shortly after she arrived, but Marcus and his sister recovered, and one year later, they were welcomed into a loving middle-class white family in Gothenburg, Sweden. It was there that Marcus’s new grandmother, Helga, sparked in him a lifelong passion for food and cooking with her pan-fried herring, her freshly baked bread, and her signature roast chicken. From a very early age, there was little question what Marcus was going to be when he grew up–Back Cover

Ferrari Adria is arguably the greatest culinary revolutionary of our time. Hailed as a genius and a prophet by fellow chefs, worshipped (if often misunderstood) by critics and lay diners alike, Adria is imitated and paid homage to in professional kitchens, and in more than a few private ones, all over the world.
In his lively close-up portrait of Adria, award-winning food writer Colman Andrews traces this groundbreaking chef’s rise from resort-hotel dishwasher to culinary deity, and the evolution of El Bulli from a German-owned beach bar into one of the world’s best restaurants. With a new afterword revealing the future of El Bulli, Perron brings to life the most exciting food movement of our time and illuminates the ways in which Adria has forever altered our understanding and appreciation of food and cooking.–Back Cover

To support his endeavors, Timmermeister prepared weekly dinners from the farm’s bounty. With the menus designed to reflect the changing seasons on Vashon Island, the Cookhouse dinners brought people out fo the city and onto the farm to share a locally grown, home-cooked meals. Growing a Feast tells the story of a Kurtwood Farms Cookhouse dinner, from farm to table.–Book Jacket

A project management assignment planted a seed that bloomed at the Roblin Centre’s John and Bonnie Buhler Library. Library Technician Rosemary Woodby with the support of a Program Innovation Fund (PIF) was able to procure two six foot tall, self-watering planters. A partnership with the Greenspace Horticultural students and their instructor, Ruth Rob, supplied the plants. Using the knowledge they have acquired as part of the Horticulture Practice course, the students planned the design and layout; chose and grew the plants and on a bright sunny Apr 13th installed them in the planters. The Reading Room’s trademark sunlight takes care of the rest.

Living Walls, sometimes called Green Walls, have sprung up in a variety of settings, both inside and out. Some of the larger interior walls are physically connected to the HVAC system to actively pull air in for better circulation. Our wall isn’t quite so complicated however, using a ‘passive system’ as illustrated by the Florafelt system (Pictured right). While the project is not without risks ranging from plant to pump failure, but the gains far outweigh them and we can expect:

Noise reduction

Optimizing humidity

Improved indoor air quality

And the Horticulture students gaining an opportunity to work in a vertical format that is gaining popularity with both interior and exterior landscaping.

Last but not least, the greenery provides some welcome relief for staff and students from the stressful periods during the academic year. Woodby and Rob hope to apply what they have learned from installing this wall and add a second next year.

After

Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose. – Zora Neale Hurston, author

The feasibility study, the information report, the literature review, and the research paper may come from different areas, but the process feels the same. I write ‘feels’ as gathering information tends to overwhelm people trying to management their time at school. EBSCO can look daunting with thousands of results, or redoing search terms to get to the items needed for a project.

EBSCOhost provides a way to personalize the experience called My EBSCOhost Folder.I began using mine two years ago to keep tracks of articles of interest relating to college programs, or professional development:

Before searching in EBSCO, I sign into my account. It’s best to create an account, or sign in, soon after logging into EBSCO from the library homepage.

For details about My EBSCOhost Folders, this YouTube video outlines the process:

Still not sure? Want some one-on-one assistance? Come to the library and we can connect you with My Folder, and much more.

Under our sidebar asking ‘What Would You Like to Do?’ click on ‘Search EBSCOhost’

Login with your username and password

Choose EBSCOhost eBooks (See picture below)

A number of new collections have joined our EBSCO package in areas ranging from clinical, business, and education. (That’s only a small sampling.) From this list, a user can search for eBooks on certain topics.

Selection: Taking It All In, or Focus The Search

For example, I wanted to browse the eBook collection for entrepreneurship books. After logging in, I chose EBSCOhost ebooks, and put a check mark on the Business eBook Collection (Click the image to see a detailed view of this image):

In the search box I typed ‘entrepreneurship’ as my search term, but I also know some people like to use the term ‘start ups’. I decide to use the Boolean operator ‘or’ to get ebooks on either ‘entrepreneurship’ or ‘start ups’ (click image for a detailed view):

The results, all 388 of them, appear by ‘relevance’. In other words it finds the ebooks, much like physical books or articles, with the terms I used somewhere in the record. It’s great for browsing, but I want to see what’s new or what just got added to the collection? (click image for a detailed view):

As the image shows you can sort results from newest to oldes. Slide the time bar to the left to adjust the publication timeline. In this instance, the results for Entrepreneurship gave me results going as far back as 1978. It’s great as an historical overview, but not so great if you need something specific like financing, or taking an idea from concept to reality. (Click image below for a detailed view.)

What Would You Like to Do Next?

What Can You Do?: Using Your Selection

Click on any of the results, and your relevant terms appear as pages in the full record. You can view the pages, or see the full text PDF. The best part involves skipping the preface/introductions to get to the book itself (click image below for a further looks):

As stated earlier, downloading is not an option. However, n PDF mode you can cite, email pages, and even save a limited number of pages. However it means looking through the eBook with a purpose to save important pages for your business plan, report, or paper. The option looks like this :

This mode also works across all the major browsers (Internet Explorer, Chrome etc.) insuring the page needed for the end result.

When in Doubt…Ask

Still not sure? Got to a point in your search and wondered what next? Come to the reference desk to ask Library staff your questions. Staff can sit with students for one-on-one instruction on searching EBSCO ebooks, or learn about any of our services.

The Canadian Cancer Society website reports some startling estimates for the third leading cancer among men:

23,600 men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer. This represents 24% of all new cancer cases in men in 2014.

4,000 men will die from prostate cancer. This represents 10% of all cancer deaths in men in 2014.

On average, 65 Canadian men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer every day.

On average, 11 Canadian men will die from prostate cancer every day.

From its modest beginnings in Australia, Movember continues to grow as an event across the word. As more and more countries join the cause, Canada continues to add to the 574 million dollars raised since 2003. From milk moustaches to wispy bristles to a full handle bar, Movember continues to raise money and awareness about Prostate cancer.

The library carries a number of resources related to Prostrate cancer. Ask us how to search for this, or any other, topic.

At first glance it seems a Recreational Reading Book Exchange located in an academic library might cause some confusion. There are already books therefore why have a place for potboilers, romances, and fantasy? Besides already drawing you into the library after noticing book four in A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Marin, why not stay for the crash-course on how to search a database at the reference desk. It’s not an outlandish idea, in fact many colleges and universities have developed their own leisure reading programs for students.

While Red River finds itself only minutes from the Millennium Library, some students may not be eligible for a library card. If time is tight, money for students feels even tighter, to the point that $12.99 paperback looks like a splurge. For others, myself included, it’s a case of books taking up space in personal libraries. Perhaps it’s time to part with a copy, and hope it ends up as someone’s latest discovery. The Recreational Reading Book Exchange may fulfill all those needs, and also enhances academic achievement in ways like:

On April 24th the library solicited donations as part of the Red River College EcoFair proving donating gently used books also helps support the environment as well. However, we take donations year round at both campuses, in any genre, for that one moment a reader wants a break from textbooks for a quick trip to New York, Northern Ontario, or Westeros.